After an overturned fish truck on state Route 99 caused a nine-hour
citywide traffic jam last March, Mayor Ed Murray and other city
officials adamantly defended the city’s slow response. The national
experts, whom Murray commissioned to study the incident response, came
up with a different conclusion.

Seattle can’t be everything to everyone, as many who
can’t afford to live in the city are quickly learning. But that hasn’t
stopped the city from considering whether to be one of the few U.S.
municipalities to have a broadband utility.

Later this month, Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and
Livability Advisory will issue its oft-delayed recommendations on how to “chart a
course for the next 10 years to ensure the development and preservation
of a diversity of housing for people across the income spectrum” in
Seattle.

In the early August primary, Seattle voters will get their first chance
to cast ballots under our new system of district elections. As we look over a large field of candidates, however, we’re somewhat disappointed.

Some people may relish the idea of turning the tables on police
officers, especially after getting cited for traffic or parking
violations. But some of them have taken it a little too far, filing
petty complaints to the Office of Professional Accountability for
“coercive horn-honking” to, apparently, aggressive mustaches.

There are things that seem so physical, like smoke, you try to grab it, only to see it seep through your fingers. How you can be physically in a place and yet not be of the place is
another curious twist of fate, especially when your ancestry goes back
400 years in that same place.

Recently, Mayor Ed Murray decided to ban smoking in public parks.While the ban is for a good cause and will make parks an even
safer and healthier place, it seems like the city and even parks
department have bigger fish to fry.